LUZ

As house and underground dance music goes, what makes Axel Boman interesting isn’t just his sense of rhythm or sound design, but his emotional range. Like its companion, *Quest for Fire*, *Luz* is a quietly psychedelic journey that shifts between seductive (“Nowhere Good”) and playful (“Atra”), earnest techno (“Edgeware Rd”) and musical banana peels (“Grape”) with a nimbleness that catches you off guard. Do you laugh at the chintzy poetry of “Out Sailing” (“My love is out sailing…all over the world”), or does it catch your heart? Does your heart catch at the inspirational thrust of “Hold On” (“When the going gets tough, it sucks”), or does it make you laugh? You sense Boman wants both.

The Stockholm producer offers a bewildering yet comforting gateway to his tragicomic worldview on an ambitious set of complementary albums.